Janet Kerschner/Sandbox

UNDER CONSTRUCTION
UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky has frequently been mentioned in literature, art, film, and other forms of popular culture. Here are some examples.

Books

Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse

Koontz, Dean. Odd Apocalypse. New York: Random House, 2012.

This novel is one of an excellent series about Odd Thomas, a young man who can see and communicate with dead people whose spirits have not passed over to the next phase of existence.

Here he is discussing Constantine Cloyce, a wealthy newspaper mogul and film studio owner, who built an estate called Roseland based on time-travel equipment designed by Nikola Tesla. While Odd Thomas is visiting Roseland, he encounters a ghost woman on a ghost stallion who seeks his help; strange machinery controlling a mysterious flow of energy through the property; evidence of numerous murders; and vicious creatures from a dystopian future that resemble feral pigs.

Cloyce had also been an enthusiast of unusual – even bizarre – theories ranging from those of the famous medium and psychic Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to those of the world-renowned physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla. (page 21)

Some believed that Cloyce, here at Roseland, had once secretly financed research and development into such things as death rays, contemporary approaches to alchemy, and telephones that would allow you to talk to the dead. But then some people also believe that Social Security is solvent. Odd Thomas finds the blueprints and engineering drawings of the buildings, and encounters the spirit of Nikola Tesla.

Page 252: And on my first day in Roseland, chatting with Henry Lolam at the gatehouse, I learned that Constantine Cloyce had been interested in cutting-edge science and in the supernatural, having been friends with an unlikely spectrum of people that included the psychic and medium Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and at the extreme other end, the famous physicist and inventor Tesla.

Finding Madame Blavatsky’s famed name on the blueprints would have been strange, but it was nowhere to be seen. Whatever might be going on at Roseland, I suspected now that it might have nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with science. Weird science, but science nonetheless. In the wide, shallow drawers of the map chest, I found many sets of mechanical-systems plans, all signed by Nikola Tesla. Among them were drawings of – and engineering specifics related – the spheres, the flywheels standing on the bell-shaped machines, the intricate arrangements of gears I’d see in the subcellars of the mausoleum, and much more.

I felt pretty sure that I knew the identity of the tall, gaunt, mustachioed man who had spoken to me on three occasions. Mr. Nikola Tesla. Considering that he died decades ago but wasn’t a lingering spirit like any I’d previously encountered, I knew who he was but not what he was.

Peter Ackroyd, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Ackroyd, Peter. The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

In this novel designed as a diary of Oscar Wilde, he said of his wife Constance and his mother: "They became close friends: they would shop together and on the evenings when I was not at home, evenings which became too frequent, they would sit and talk about the children, or about Madame Blavatsky." (page 76)